Bits and Bytes and Boats! What in the world is he on about?
Well, there actually is relevance between bits and bytes and boat rentals these days.
Studies show that more and more yacht/boat/charter rentals are being done online.
Historically, it was easier to run a charter/boat rental company.
The basics of the business were pretty well understood.
You needed some boats to rent out, a place to keep them, insurance for your boats, you needed to ensure the renters (or at least have a waiver), and you needed to advertise – usually done via the telephone book, some signs, and very often via word of mouth.
The world today has changed a lot, due to the Internet.
When I grew up, we always went to one of either two spots for our vacation.
As we loved being on the sea, we nearly always rented a boat for either an hour, a day or sometimes for several days.
So how did we find the boat rental company?
Well, we usually went to the harbour/wharf/port and looked for the signs, sometimes we also looked in the telephone book, and other times, we went where someone told us to go.
Boom, the Internet arrives, and now when I need to rent a boat, where do I go? The Harbour? Of course not, I go online and search for the boat I want, and why not?
I can see the pictures of the boats, I can read about the boat, I can read reviews about the rental company, and most importantly of all, I can book and confirm my boat rental directly over the internet. Tap Tap Tap, my keyboard makes me King!
The market is changing so much, that many boat rental companies now report that over 25% of their rentals are now made over the internet in some manner, either through email, booking “forms”, or full fledged online booking systems that boat rental businesses can use.
So if it there wasn’t already enough for a boat rental business owner to do, you also now have to, have a website, handle bookings via a new channel, and make sure your business is still streamlined and profitable.
So what options are out there for the boat rental companies, and what does a boat rental company need to be up-to-date, streamlined and profitable.
I have listed what you should look for when you are looking for a solution.
1. Make sure the system handles your company size
a. You don’t need a system to handle thousands of boats; you need something to handle 1, 5 or 100 boats depending on the size of your business.
2. Make sure the system can handle all types of bookings, both online, and manually entered by you.
a. The solution you choose must, via its management tool, allow you to handle bookings via normal email and via the phone and walk-ins, so make sure the system can do this.
3. Make sure the system manages inventory (your boats)
a. As you now have to be on the Internet, make sure you are getting its benefits. One of the great benefits is that a good reservation system will “know” what boats you have, and “when” they are rented out. Make sure you don’t choose some system that simply emails you bookings, this leaves you needing to still check availability. This is really important – it means you will no longer need some paper book or excel spreadsheet to keep track of bookings.
4. Make sure the system can handle some form of Credit Card processing
a. It is very common to confirm a booking with credit card details. This covers you in the case of no-shows etc.
NOTE: Be aware, you may not need a merchant account – many companies use a system that records the credit card details, but allows you to charge the cards in the usual way, saving some of the Merchant Account costs associated with receiving payments over the Internet.
5. Make sure the system has reports
a. Another benefit of moving to a “system” is reports. The reports that should be available to you are:
i. Rentals for a day or period
ii. Customer lists (can be used for email campaigns after)
iii. Other exist, but these ones are important
6. Micro-Site
a. Make sure your system provider also provides you with a micro-site, and the micro-site should also handle bookings to your products. A micro-site should be a web page or multiple web pages about your business on the providers website. This has two advantages:
i. If you don’t have your own website, the micro-site can be used as your website URL (link) on your business cards, signs, etc
ii. The providers website can provide you more bookings. Note: Some providers take a commission for bookings done through their website – be aware of this hidden “cost”. (WebReserv.eu does not)
7. Booking Component
a. The provider of your system MUST include a form of booking component you can use on your own website. Do not go for a system that sends you an email, even if the booking form looks great. This will simply leave you the work of still checking availability, confirming the bookings, etc. A good booking component does the following:
i. Is connected with the system and only allows bookings when a product is available – this must work in “Real Time”, meaning as soon as a booking is made, either manually through the management tool, or through the website booking component, then the product must be marked as booked everywhere.
ii. Can run with either auto-confirm or manual confirm for you in the management part. There is no need to manually confirm a booking if the system you choose knows what is available or already booked. This is a way the Internet can save you a LOT of time.
iii. Handle your changing rates over high, low, medium seasons etc
iv. Handle special seasonal prices
v. Handle discount codes (Becomes a good marketing tool)
vi. Can be placed easily on your website, or any other friendly websites you want to put your booking component on
vii. Allows you to manually mark a product as “unavailable”, this is important if/when you want to use it yourself, or it is unavailable due to maintenance, etc
8. Sends booking email to you
a. Even though the booking system is fully automated, you still want the system to send you an email when a booking is automatically made over the Internet. This is not so important if you are renting out boats every single day, and are always therefore logged into your booking system, but if you only receive bookings infrequently, then you want to be informed about it.
9. Easy to use
a. The solution should be easy to use, as you don’t want to need a computer science degree to use it.
10. Dynamic
a. Make sure the system works for YOUR needs – you are looking for a system that supports YOUR business, and doesn’t force you into processes, methods, prices, deposits, etc that are not of benefit to you.
11. Cost
a. Make sure the system doesn’t cost you a fortune, and also try to get one that doesn’t take a commission for any bookings through “their” website.
That sounds like an awful lot doesn’t it?
Already shaking in your knees about cost?
Well, it’s cheaper than you think these days!
That is the wonderful world of the Internet.
Because of the way the Internet works, companies can create and provide a software system “over the internet”, where you don’t actually need to “buy” the software and install it. This is often called Software-As-a-Service (SAS or SaaS sometimes).
What you buy is the right to “use” the software, and all you need is a computer connected to the Internet with a browser. The browser becomes the “program”.
This allows software providers the ability to distribute the cost over all the clients, and no longer have the overheads of packaging, updating, postage, etc. It also saves our green planets resources, as instead of each company needing to buy PC’s to run the software on, often hundreds of clients can be run on several powerful computers.
So what solutions are there?
There are loads out there, and this article will look at WebReserv.
WebReserv started 4 years ago in the USA, and have now also opened in Europe. Their websites are www.webreserv.eu for Europe and www.webreserv.com for the USA.
I will go through the above points and explain how WebReserv supports them all, and more…Pricing is from the European site.
1. Make sure the system handles your company size
a. The WebReserv system was designed for small to medium sized companies.
b. It also allows you in the standard Silver and Gold packages to handle up to 40 different “products”, which could actually be hundreds of boats. You may have 3 Bay-liners, and 4 Flat-bottoms. In the WebReserv system, this counts as only 2 products, with 3 and 4 Units respectively.
c. There base package allows up to 500 bookings a month, which is enough for most small and mid-sized businesses
2. Make sure the system can handle all types of bookings, both online, and manually entered by you.
a. The WebReserv system has a very easy and simple to use booking interface for rental management – allowing you to handle any phone or walk-in bookings.
3. Make sure the system manages inventory (your boats)
a. The WebReserv system all runs on one central database, which means that your management tool, your micro-site, and the booking component you have put on your, or any of your partners and friends websites, are all up to date with latest availability – dates change to red as soon as product is no longer available
4. Make sure the system can handle some form of Credit Card processing
a. WebReserv can be configured to handle payments via Cash/Check, PayPal and Credit card – Which are basically all the options you could need.
5. Reports
a. The WebReserv system has the ones listed above and a couple more
6. Micro-Site
a. When you use the WebReserv system, you get your own Micro-site, where you have texts, pictures, features, attractions, booking component, maps and directions and contact us features. They also provide you with a link (URL) to your website which will be www.webreserv.eu/yourcompanyname
7. Booking Component
a. WebReserv calls their booking component a booking “Widget”. It can be completely customized to handle how you want to handle your bookings, and can be given your style sheet (CSS – i.e. colour and font etc) so it even fits perfectly into your website. It can be embedded directly on the page, or you can simply place a link that pops up the booking component in a new window. Once logged into the management tool, there is a section that shows you exactly how to place it on your website.
8. Sends booking email to you
a. The WebReserv system sends a notification about when a new booking is made. It also of course sends out pending, confirmed and cancelled emails at a click of the mouse to the client – NOTE: These can even be customized to exactly what you want .
9. Easy to use
a. The WebReserv is very easy to use, and if you are in doubt, you can buy set-up of website and rates to help you through the process from the WebReserv support staff. They also use a pc-to-pc system that allows them to support you while you both look at the same screen.
10. Dynamic
a. The WebReserv system is extremely dynamic, as it can be used to not only handle boat rentals, but also basically everything under the sun – you can easily configure it to your even most complex pricing and rates.
11. Cost
a. The WebReserv system costs 199.00 € / year for the full booking system without credit card handling. If you also want credit card handling, it costs 399.00€ per year.
b. If you want help setting up it up, then WebReserv.eu charges only 150.00€ to set everything up and help you put the booking component on your own website.
There are many booking systems out there – but only WebReserv seems to have prioritised the flexibility aspect to ensure their system works how you want it to work, ergo, not forcing your round business into a square hole.
If you want more information, then contact www.webreserv.eu via the website or call them on +34 67 55 87 052.
If you want to read more about the WebReserv system, then go to http://www.webreserv.eu/products_webreserv.do
